I actually find it a little bit easier to get assists now, but you really kinda have to go about it differently. Seems the best way is to just get a plain, simple, low damage, regular hit on a plane and then completely disengage. Chances are better that some will take care of them for you than how it was in the past. Previous to this change, you basically had to go for a critical hit and then hope someone took them out later. When a great deal of the time they would crash or die due to your damage and you’d get a kill instead of the desired assist. It takes some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, I think getting an assist is now easier than scoring a critical hit. I would also add that critical hits are not as hard to come by as when the change was first made. I mean after a short time they even lowered the number of crits you needed to do the tasks, but it was still difficult to do. I re-roll crit hit tasks all the time now when before they were one of the tasks I preferred. Try it some and see if you can manage it better, we just cannot do most of what we have been doing for years now and get the same results . . . game is different for sure. I don’t know if it is better or worse, but regardless . . . it’s what we have to work with, so may as well make the best of it. . . . until it gets changed again . . lol.
Only certain way I have found to get critical hits now is to go after the SPAA they have placed behind the pillboxes on the emplacements of certain maps . . the newer Air Conquest maps, Volcano Valley & Rocky Pillars come to mind, they have them. Harder to take out than most “soft” ground targets and almost always get a crit before they die. Just not a lot of them on each map, but generally not looked at by too many players.
Hope that is helpful . . .
Yeah yeah . . light damage, I find a single “Hit” on the screen will generally do the trick. Get that hit then disengage . . . you’ll have better luck getting an assist than in the past . . . not a lot, but still better. Trick is stopping in time . . . that little extra shot can easily turn it into a Severe Damage and then your chances for an assist are gone. I don’t change my belts, maybe plane selection order sometimes. But basically I just adjust how I shoot now for various things. Hardest part for me has been the lousy hit detection that came along with all this . . can’t trust the lead indicator at all anymore, I just use it for “ranging” for my convergence more than anything . . . lol, but at least it helps a little with that
The assist from regular hits works the same way as before.
My record in the old system was 17 assists in one Air Arcade battle. It’s much harder to repeat that nowadays with much less critical hits and inability to get additional assist from an already dead plane (technically it’s still possible, but it’s a very rare situation after the changes).
The difference with assists between a hit and a critical hit is actually very simple.
Critical hit guarantees you an assist. So when you see a critical hit, when this player die from your teammate, you will get an assist. Well, to be precise, there are three situations where critical hit won’t lead to an assist: when the critically damaged target crash/J-out, when the battle end before your teammate kill that critically damaged plane and when that critically damaged plane land and repair (repair ‘removes’ all critical hits on the target).
With regular hits it’s a bit more complicated. When you hit an enemy plane, there is a hidden timer attached to your hit. If the enemy you hit die within 30 seconds in Arcade (or within 60 seconds in Realistic) you will get an assist. You can count this time in your head and when it’s close to the end, you can hit the target again (this will reset the timer). But it’s harder to get an assist this way, because you have to keep controlling your target. With a critical hit you don’t have to do this.
More info about this here:
Attack the green areas shown in the screenshot:
Basically almost every plane part that is in the middle of the plane (red area) won’t give you a critical hit anymore. It’s not 100% correct, there is still at least one part in the red area that can give you a critical hit when destroyed (turns to black), but it’s very rare to see this, and I’m not sure which one it is. The only reliable parts you can shoot at for critical hits are green areas.
Yes, thank you for a more detailed explanation. And yeah the way it was before this is very good way to approach things. But since the “change”, critical hits are just a mystery and seem far more random and more difficult to get, intentionally or not. I have just found it a bit easier to work assists now than in the past and crits just . . . well . . . ya never know now. And a great deal of all that hinges on the hit detection which has been “nerfed”/changed a great deal than in the past. Last year, Aug/Sept/Oct (I forget exactly) there was this very same hit detection “dampening” in game for roughly 4 - 6 weeks, then everything went back to normal, all well before the Severe Damage mechanic was even mentioned. I have to assume this was some sort of “hidden” testing for implementing the new mechanic. It was like the hitboxes were shrunken a great deal or something . . made everything seem very “RNG” when shooting at planes . . even ground targets became a little dodgy. I was glad to see it go away, but it is back with the implementation of the Severe Damage mechanic. Overall, I do not mind the new mechanic too much, just takes some getting used to, but that poor hit detection thing has made “skill” a lot less important and yeah . . seems far too RNG for my tastes . . but it is what it is, C’est la Vie
OK, so:
- destroying enemy’s elevator, essentialy removing the most important control surface? I sleep.
- making horizontal stabilizer black without damaging the elevator, so the plane can still dogfight just fine?
REAL DEAL.
The plane in the screenshot is NOT severly damaged.
Meanwhile planes which retain both elevators and have no other damage, than then proceed to dogfight me - severe damage.
This plane is also not severly damaged (the guy bailed out after getting into spin seconds later, and I got the kill, but I did not even get a crit, it’s just a hit nowadays):
Oh and “burn for 3 minutes and continue to dogfight” thing is back.
I got damaged by F82 because after quite a long engine fire caused by friendly, I assumed he was done for. A minute later it turns out the guy is shooting at me, he then kept burning for quite some time before the teammate finished him off because he wasn’t going anywhere.
Similar story with burning P-47 who flew past me, then proceeder to fly back to base, land while burning and get repaired. He burned for 2:40 before the repair started, he did not take any damge other than dead engine in the process.
Also, this plane was only destroyed because the pilot bailed out. It has 0 engine, 0 control surfaces with sole exception of rudder (GL with that) yet it’s drifting through the air waiting to get kill-stolen by some low life:
Played a few matches, impression is that it only complicates a system that is already not easy to understand by the regular player. New players will never understand their rewards and will have to read a 1 page large wiki about the kill mechanic.
Furthermore it solves no issue while introduces others, I liked the old mechanic more.
I have to still agree with this :)
It actually lowers my KpB because “severly damaged” enemies are getting kill-stolen left and right, horribad players are diving afyer spinning and burning targets with even more enthusiasm, leaving their teammates alone and outnumbered.
At the same time the horizontal stabilizer bug causes planes that are dogfight-capable to be counted as severly damaged and planes with no elevator heading towards the ground and in best case - barely capable to make it back - to be treated as “hit” which confuses the player (I will usually stop going after no-elevator dude if there are other enemy planes around, but I’ll sure as hell recommit for the guy I barely “hit”.
How is this hurting your kills per battle? Any plane you severely damaged is counted as a kill for you at battle’s end. So, again, how does getting a kill hurt your kills per battle?
It doesn’t.
If I just severly damage someone and someone finishes off, only “finishing off” counts towards kills per battle, at least that’s how it worked when people tested it.
It doesn’t help that real “severe damage” counts as “hit”, while superficial damage is counted as severe damage because reasons.
EDIT: unless Gaijin has fixed it, but I kinda doubt it.
Just so I understand, you’re suggesting that even though Gaijin has said that a player will get credited for a kill of any aircraft they’ve severely damaged that ends up getting finished off by another player, Gaijin is actually not allowing that kill to be included in the math done to determine a player’s kill per battle result? That would seem like either a lot of work on Gaijin’s part to make that happen for no real reason, or a crazy oversight on their part. (And if it’s true, I would think the latter is the more likely explanation.)
I’m not really hung up on the kills per battle number, but I can appreciate how many folks are. It would be interesting to see any examples where this is happening. At the end of a battle I see that the +1 kill number (or however many you get) you see while the match is ongoing, ends up getting included in the overall kill count for the match results. As long as I see that, then I carry on. But if those kills aren’t really being counted as kills, then I’d also be curious to know more about the situation.
Please read for example my old post in this topic:
The person with severe damage only gets partial kill, that is counted for tasks and challenges, but is not counted in their service records.
In one of the official articles Gaijin even admit this change can lead to more kill steals than before. This matter was discussed so many times in this topic and a few other topics, I’m really bored of explaining all this again and again. So if you have more questions, just… read this topic. And yes, I know there are a lot of posts here, but you can try to use the search in the topic forum function.
Well, 1 kill per plane shot down - lets call that consistency. There’s a reason it’s killstealers name is displayed in killfeed, and not your own.
I will probably test that today, but people have tested this before and while maybe it counts towards plane scorecard (which is useless anyway as AI/bots are crammed together and there’s no dostinction between air RB and ground RB) I highly doubt it counts towards KPB. Gaijin loves catering towards low life stat padders, you know.
This is definitely a major issue with aircraft that are designed differently (twin-boom for example), made worse when the aircraft was modeled with one system in mind before being forced to another.
For example, the P-38 realistically has a very strong twin-tail, so very high amounts of damage must be done to it in order to destroy the tail. This is correctly modeled in-game, I have experienced this when flying so low that I momentarily tap the tail to the ground, at speed.
I would consider this boom as “no longer having structural support”.
However, because of the blanket effect of Severe Damage instead of the careful thoughts of “what lets this plane fly?”, we get instances where mild damage occurs and the pilot continues to fly, only to have a death counted; and other instances where any sane pilot IRL would bail and no death is counted - the player merely pays a small repair cost at the hangar.
In reality, the real issue of Severe Damage is forced ejection at the end of the match. If I have ruined a plane to the point of writing off at the end of the match, bill me a full repair cost as befitting a “written off” plane! Don’t kick me out of it, as though my pilot made the illogical move to eject from a plane still functional. Trust me, flying as far home as the broken plane will take you is significantly faster (at least, initially) than having to walk the entire way to base on foot.
What I think Gaijin misunderstands is that players do not like game mechanics that “intervene”. I stopped playing Arcade not because it wasn’t fun or that the grind was slower, but because I was forced to leave the plane in instances where I would have liked to continue fighting or was capable of returning home.
I was still flying - let me fly!
I have also commented on the bug-report website @_Poul and @Loofah have as well - Community Bug Reporting System
My sentiment is echoed here by forum users discussing in the original feedback/suggestions: [Development] Testing out the Severe Damage mechanic - #114 by _WiKi
You were written off because of severe damage. All severe damage conditions can be found here:
Severe damage to a plane is considered to be: destruction of all engines (or destroying one engine if there is only one left), destruction of all elements of the control system (or the remaining controls left), which makes impossible to control the ailerons, elevators and rudders, separation of more than half of at least one wing, and destruction of all horizontal stabilizers (or the remainder of the horizontal stab).
[Development] Testing out the Severe Damage mechanic - News - War Thunder
Destruction of all elevators is already considered as severe damage. The problem is with horizontal stabilizers that aren’t affecting the plane performance (at least not much), but are counted as severe damage.
The whole written off mechanics makes sense, because the severe damage mechanics keeps planes alive for longer. If they didn’t kill severely damaged planes at the end of the battle, it would cause less kills than in the previous system, because players with completely broken planes just spinning in the air for minutes could survive, even if they should already be dead (their death is just delayed with the new severe damage mechanics that replaced most kill conditions).
Why a person, who caused this damage to me, shouldn’t be credited with a kill?
Spoiler
Just because the battle ended before I crashed, after spinning for a few minutes? I’m already dead in this situation. So it makes sense to credit a player who caused all this damage to me.
In the old system I would be literally dead already. I’m only alive on the screenshot because the new severe damage mechanics keeps me alive. That’s the problem caused by this new mechanics and the solution to this problem is the written off mechanics.
If the horizontal stabilizers wouldn’t be considered as severe damage, the mechanics would work most of the time correctly and wouldn’t kill you in the screenshots you shown. You were written off only because your damage (black horizontal stabilizers) are currently counted as severe damage.
During the test of the severe damage mechanics there were a few bugs like this one. This specific bug should already be fixed:
Well, things aren’t looking good for us in regards to crits being fixed. Looks like 2 of the bug reports regarding crits have been closed as “not a bug”.
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/2jZfQ6dK2Kni?comment=Epx0OU0AYywPfS1GqLsFQdqH
https://community.gaijin.net/issues/p/warthunder/i/mYplf6Sip5Qe?comment=G4NvA70hJF28d3qF3Y5D9sfg
T says “Nothing has been changed in the critical damage mechanics.” But we know that this is not the case…
Interestingly it also appears that some of the comments I and others had made on the reports were removed. Is that standard practice for bug reports once they’re addressed?
The comments are removed if break the rules or are off topic.
It doesn’t hurt your “kill count” so much as it lowers your payout overall. It’s kinda cool for doing kill/assist based tasks(not so much for crits now, that part’s all mucked up) so it’s kind of a double edged sword. I wouldn’t say it’s so much “moving the goal posts”, but it sure seems as if the shape of the playing field has been altered a good deal. I’m more concerned over the hit detection nerf that has come along with all this . . . it’s turned everything into an RNG mess really . . . kinda sad. Skill has basically been taken off the table now . .
What hit detection issue? I’ve had a round where I single-fired Shvak at Spitfire Mk Vc and each shot I aimed well connected and did damage.
Could you please elaborate?
It’s all over the place in Air AB. Granted a good deal of it might bit lag/latency differential between me and whoever I am shooting at. But it has definitely changed. And as I mentioned, this exact same thing occurred last year and I was not the only one that noticed it. We were basically doing some kind of testing then, and now it’s pretty easy to figure it was for this new mechanic. I can’t count the times each game where I have a guy dead to rights, square in my sights and firing away and nothing, no sparks, not hits, no nothing. It’s very common now. And it does go both ways, I have fired at a guy for a few moments, not hits registering and then KaBlooie! . . outta nowhere they just esplode. So it’s not ALL bad hits/no hits . . . but it is pretty plain to see it is more RNG than ever before. If you play RB, it may be different there, I dunno. But in AB . . . it’s a mess
Well, such things happen when the target is experiencing extreme lag and some pocket loss may be also onvolved on your side. It makes gunnery almost impossible.
The fact that nowadays once someone is severly damaged, which may mean “barely damaged at all”, shots don’t really register, unless you “kill” the aircraft, as in: rip its tail off or kill.the pilot.
Gaijon is doing nothing to fix the “severe damage” thta is not even noticeable (black horizontal stabilizer - it counts as severe damage even ic elevator is 100% functional)